As soon as it got devolved (self) government in 1999 within the framework of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (aka UK), Wales set out on a distinctive path of school reform — or lack thereof. League tables of exam results were abolished in 2001. Wales’ strong trade unions opposed the creation of any ‘academy’ schools, which are independent of many state restrictions and are widespread in England. Parental choice has been limited to deciding whether to send a child to a school in which lessons are conducted in English or in Welsh. While England has engaged in customer-oriented reforms, Wales has indulged in what David Reynolds, an educationist at the University of Southampton, describes as “producerism’s last hurrah”.
Standards have slipped. Over the past decade Wales has failed to match the improved exam results in other parts of Britain: just 66.5 percent of GCSE entries got a decent grade in 2011, compared with 69.8 percent in England. Wales has also lagged England, Scotland and Northern Ireland in tests of how well 15-year-olds can apply their knowledge devised by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think-tank.
In an attempt to reverse this trend, Leighton Andrews, the Welsh education minister, has settled upon a new form of accountability, published in December last year. This groups secondary schools in Wales into one of five bands, according to exam results achieved by their pupils, their attendance and how well the school serves children from poor families. That has helped sort the wheat from the chaff: on January 11, BBC Wales produced the first league table for a decade using the banding data. Andrews wants to extend the exercise to primary schools in the coming months.
Yet, holding schools publicly accountable for the achievements of their pupils may not be sufficient to raise standards in Wales in the same way it has in England, says Reynolds. In rural parts of the country, exercising choice is impractical for parents; even in urban areas, sending children to the local school is a deeply ingrained tradition. Instead he points to the improvements made by schools that are using data to sharpen teaching.
Sandfields Comprehensive School, for example, lies in the middle of a housing estate close to a steel works and the site of a former petrochemical plant on the edge of Port Talbot. Its pupils are mostly poor, yet the proportion who pass their school-leaving exams has risen steadily over the past few years. Mike Gibbon, head of the school, attributes its success to a programme overseen by Sam Stringfield of the University of Louisville in Kentucky, in which pupils are tested regularly. The results are used to identify gaps in their knowledge that are promptly plugged.
This is good, but hardly sufficient, progress. As Wales comes around to the discipline of accountability and transparency that has been commonplace in England for the past decade, English schools are heading in a radical new direction, towards financial independence and parental oversight. Whether this will greatly improve standards is an open question. What is certain is that, if it does, Wales will still lag.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)